Acer Iconia Tab A510 shipments halted due to hardware defect

Planning on purchasing an Acer Iconia Tab A510 any time soon? You might want to put those plans on hold: Acer's German Facebook page has announced that the tablets that Acer has on hand are defective due to a faulty component. Acer didn't day which component had the issue, but they were quick to assure customers that the tablets that have already been sold or are currently on store shelves are not affected.

The A510 is the yearly refresh to Acer's original Iconia Tab A500, with the addition of Ice Cream Sandwich out of the box and an NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor. The Facebook page says that the A511 3G model is also affected, though that particular variant isn't available in the US. Speaking of things that are only available overseas, the Facebook post also confirms that the hi-res A700 will be available in Germany on May 24th, notably without whatever defect is causing the problem.

Not to play the doubting Thomas here, but what are the odds that the issue in question affects only those A510 units that haven't been sold yet? Without more clarification from Acer, there's just no way to be sure. Reportedly the problem manifests in crashes and random reboots, but that's hardly helpful in determining the issue. If I were in the market for a tablet, I think I'd take a hard look at ASUS' Transformer Pad TF300 over the Acer equivalent, at least for the moment.